Fiba Retail trusts Fiery® for its in-store printing needs

Fiba Retail chose EFI’s Fiery® IC-416 Server with SmartRIP technology for in-store printing of price tags, sales campaign information and other visual materials in all of its 82 stores.

Fiba Retail, part of the Fiba Holding Group which operates in a wide range of sectors, manages 82 stores under different brands. The company was searching for a solution for the in-store printing of visual materials to be used in its GAP, Marks & Spencer and other top-name stores, and settled on Konica Minolta dealer Gama Office Automation Systems. Fiba Retail tested the Konica Minolta bizhub C308 model with the EFI Fiery IC-416 Server with SmartRIP and decided to perform in-house printing for these stores using 30 Konica Minolta bizhub C308 printers equipped with Fiery servers. Hakan Yılmaz, who managed the project for Fiba Retail, described the investment saying “We needed a competitively priced solution, but because of the brands’ colours we also needed a solution that offered high colour quality. In addition to our basic requirement of low investment and printing costs combined with high print quality, it also needed to be easy to use for in-store operators who didn’t have a lot of printing experience.”

200,000 print runs a year in 82 stores

“Fiba Retail has 82 stores under 4 different brands. The main reason for launching this operation was the need to communicate the latest offers and promotions to our customers in a timely manner.

All print data content received from abroad includes the colours and fonts that match the corporate identity. Generally, in line with the global rules and framework, the original colour tones in our data are intense and include custom Pantone shades. Therefore accurate printing was our top priority.” Yılmaz adds that using this investment, which they undertook based on a predicted 200,000 print runs per annum, the main dimensions printed are 30×30, 27.5×32.5, 24×33, 21×18, 19×18 and 12×20, along with A3 and A5.

Less time loss and reduced costs

Yılmaz Tuna, General Manager of Konica Minolta’s business partner Gama Office Automation Systems, says of the project: “When talking to Fiba Retail, we asked them to describe their printing needs and business processes. We learned that they obtained the inserts, brochures and materials for their in-store offers from various copy centres in Istanbul, stored them in their office, and then distributed them to their stores around the country via cargo. This system was causing a serious waste of time and unnecessary expense to our customer. We recommended our Konica Minolta bizhub C308 model equipped with EFI Fiery IC-416 with SmartRIP technology. The bizhub C308 is an office machine that prints up to 30 pages of black and white or colour per minute. With the Fiery solution we can provide the exact required corporate colours to our customers.

Rapid and interactive printing at the click of a button

The Fiery IC-416 Server with SmartRIP is a powerful piece of equipment that facilitates the production of professionally finished documents without the need for user expertise. Large and complex documents can be processed quickly with Fiery SmartRIP technology, which improves productivity by RIPping the queued jobs in the most efficient way. Brochures, sales guides, manuals and much more can be created using Fiery VUE, a free 3D visual print application. The Fiery IC-416 Server, with its interactive and intuitive interface that produces professional materials with just a few clicks, uses Fiery Spot-OnTM to ensure consistent reproduction of brand identities with every print, incorporating and matching PANTONE® and custom spot colours. When assessing the decision to invest in Fiery, Yılmaz emphasises the convenience achieved.

Accurate printing with a user-friendly system

“While making our decision, we compared printed versions of print data obtained from abroad both with and without RIPping. We saw that Fiery provided us with colours that matched our brand corporate identity, and we were impressed with their service-based approach. Both for budgetary reasons and because it met our global brand standards, we decided to invest in Fiery. The greatest advantage that Fiery technology offered us was providing us with output that accurately reflected the input data, along with its user-friendliness. Being able to print visuals in precisely the way we want to and to display new offers and promotions in-store on the spot has allowed us to achieve savings of both time and money. Plus, by creating new solution processes in the way we do business, we achieve more efficient results.”

Constantly improving print quality

Tuna sums up his insights regarding the Fiba Retail project as follows: “With this investment, each Fiba Retail store can produce their own marketing documents directly from in-store equipment under the control of the print supervisor. Furthermore, the control panel was customised, allowing users to simply choose their paper size and print at the click of a button. We are proud to work with a company that is so focused on efficiency and quality.

Konica Minolta Sales and Marketing Manager Orhan Doğan says: “With our solutions partner EFI, Konica Minolta is able to offer progressively superior colour quality in our office solutions. We are happy to serve the Turkish market together with EFI, both directly and through our local reseller.”